A Christian look at contemporary and classic literary fiction and culture

Sunday, August 17, 2014

Breaking Bad: "Fly"

Half-way through the series “Breaking Bad,” our
story finds its way back to its core – the relationship between its two principal
characters. Not for the first time or the last, Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and
Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) are literally in a pit. They are in Gus Fring’s (Giancarlo
Esposito) hi-tech meth lab, cooking product in what Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan
Banks) will later say is a perfect set up. But even now, Walter is uneasy and
unsatisfied, because, no matter how much money he makes, he is not in control. His
vanity will not let him rest. This angst manifests itself in an unexpected way
due to the appearance of …a fly.

As the episode begins, Walt is worried at first
about missing product, with the hint that Jesse may be slipping some of their
blue meth for himself. But that isn’t Walt’s only worry, as he is afraid the product
is becoming contaminated.Why? Because
there is a fly in the lab.

Jessie worries that Walt’s been up to long, or
that he’s been using the meth. He also worries that Walt’s cancer has gone
to his head.“We make poison for people who don't
care," argues Jesse, who works furtively to keep their current batch of
meth that is halfway through the cook process on track. Walt orders Jesse to
cease all cooking activities until the fly is caught, and smacks him with the
swatter when Jesse continues anyway. The fly contamination must be eradicated,
an exasperated Walt claims. "This
fly is a major problem for us: It will ruin our batch, and we need to destroy
it and every trace of it so we can cook. Failing that, we're dead. There's no
more room for error, not with these people."

One is reminded, in a ridiculous way, of Ahab’s
obsession with Moby Dick. The whale is a living, multi-ton accusation that rises
from the ocean to taunt the whaler with all of his failures. A lab for a
scientist means control – not only of conditions, but variables, quality, and
even outcomes. But this fly is a threat to that – small, mobile, and
unpredictable. It represent uncleanliness, failure, disaster. And what is the fly? Guilt? Obsession?Conscience? Sin? God?

Remember the very first scene of the show? Walter
White, air mask on, stripped to his shorts, driving an RV down a desert highway
with sirens blaring, barely three weeks into his criminal enterprise? He runs
out of the RV clutching a gun and a video camera, and begins talking through
what he thinks is a last statement to his family:

“This is not an admission of guilt….there are
going to be some…things… that you’ll come to learn about me in the next few
days. I just want you to know that no matter how it may look, I only have you
in my heart….Goodbye.” Then he walks up the roadway, and points the gun at the
road ahead, ready to do whatever he has to.

This Walt, like the one in the lab, the one who has
and will murder without hesitation, was always there.Such as when he gave his life savings to
Jesse to buy an RV for their mobile meth lab, his only explanation being, “I am
awake.” Awake to evil, in a weird negation of Paul’s call in Ephesians to “awaken
sleeper” to Christ?

Or remember when Walt and Jesse had a drug dealer trapped in the basement,
unsure what to do with him? Walter prepared a benefits/liabilities list of what
the consequences of murder might be. One of his listed arguments against was
“Judeo/Christian principles.” So Walter pays some kind of homage to these, at
least for appearances’ sake, or for his own self-image. But he eventually kills
the dealer, when he feels his own life is in jeopardy. Walt doesn’t seem to believe in the
metaphysical, saying about the existence of the soul that “it’s all chemistry.”
He will not admit guilt, but he knows he’s guilty, as he admits in the episode “Gliding
Over All”: “If you believe that there is a hell…I don’t know if you’re into
that… we’re already pretty much going there. I’m not going to lie down until I
get there.” There is no hope of salvation.

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock,” Jesus
says in Revelation, an often-quoted moment of Christ’s love and benevolence in
this darkest of books. Is Walt quoting his own version of this during his most
remembered speech on the show?

“Who are you talking to right now? Who is it you think you see? Do you
know how much I make a year? I mean, even if I told you, you wouldn’t believe
it. Do you know what would happen if I suddenly decided to stop going into
work? A business big enough that it could be listed on the Nasdaq goes belly
up. Disappears. It ceases to exist without me. No. You clearly don’t know who
you are talking to. So let me clue you in. I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the
danger. A guy opens his door and he gets shot and you think of me? No. I am the
one who knocks!”

But we stray from the
fly, who keeps taunting Walt and Jesse within the Superlab. Walt grows weary of
the chase, and Jesse contrives to put him to sleep by spiking his coffee. It is
only as Mr. White sinks into unconsciousness that we finally see within Walt,
who says there’s “no end in sight.” But he isn’t speaking of the search for the
fly, but of his own predicament. We realize that for some time, he has been
wondering what the perfect moment for his death from cancer would have been. He
realizes he has lived too long, and now, he has condemned himself so that when
he dies, his family will not feel grief as much as relief. He has already put
his wife through too much. He soon pinpoints that perfect moment as the night
that Jesse’s girlfriend Jane died, when Walt gave Jesse his percentage of the
profits.

Later that evening, Walt
went to a bar, and found himself sitting next to Jane’s father. This confluence
of events will eventually lead to Jane’s death (which Walt will restrain
himself from preventing) and an air disaster in which hundreds will perish.

“The
universe is random. It’s not inevitable. It’s simple chaos. It’s subatomic
particles in endless, endless collision. That’s what science teaches us. What
is this saying? What is it telling us when on the very night that this man’s
daughter dies, it’s me who’s having a drink with him? How can that be random?... That was the
moment. That night. I should have never have left home. Never gone to your
house. Maybe things would have…I was at home watching TV. Some nature program
about elephants. And Skyler and Holly were in the other room. I could hear them
on the baby monitor. She was singing a lullaby. If I’d just lived right up to
that moment and not one second more. That would have been perfect.“

Later on, when he is in police custody, Jesse will
describe Walter White as “the devil.” “He’s smarter than you. He’s luckier than
you,” he says. But if Walt’s drugged
incredulity at the happenstance of life comes back to us, we see him as human,
frail, lost.

We often see Jesse that way, that he is often more
human than Walt, as the older man slides further and further into the abyss of
Heisenburg’s uncertain certainty. When the fly reappears, it is Jesse who
carelessly puts two cabinets in place and perches a ladder on top of them,
wailing away at the fly. He is rising further in the air, but leaving safety
behind, risking, getting closer to the possibility of success but finding it
just beyond his reach, with danger rising. Walt, sinking further, comes
accidentally close to confessing his complicity in Jane’s death – he will save
that for later with devastating effect. But he at last understands what his
missing of that perfect moment means.

Walt: Jesse, no.

Jesse: I’m so close.

Walt: Let it go. We need to cook.

Jesse: What about the contamination?

Walt: It’s all contaminated.

William Blake’s poem, “The Fly,” begins with a fly
brushing past his hand. The poet thinks on the similarities between himself and
this simplest and most common creation, both products from the same hand, like the tiger and the lamb:

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Brilliant Disguises is maintained by William Thornton, a writer who works as a reporter at an Alabama newspaper. I am a deacon in a Southern Baptist Church and teach a Sunday School class. I am the author of "The Uncanny Valley" and "Brilliant Disguises."

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I'm a reporter with the Birmingham (Ala.) News and the Alabama Media Group. You can read my reporting at al.com. I'm a Southern Baptist deacon and the author of "Set Your Fields on Fire" - http://www.amazon.com/your-fields-fire-William-Thornton/dp/1512721964/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1452519478&sr=1-1&keywords=set+your+fields+on+fire+william+thornton. You would profit from buying and reading it, you know? I know I would. Email me at wthorn7@hotmail.com if you'd like.